Amazon

Amazon is the leading e-commerce company and has managed to branch out into new markets. The company has expanded its selection via a robust third-party selling network. Meanwhile, Amazon's Kindle is the leading e-reader device, but is facing tough competition from Apple's iPad, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's Reader franchise. Amazon Web Services, the company's enterprise cloud computing unit, is gaining traction.

Hardware. Software. Services. We live in amazing times, and the technologies we use every day would have been considered magical just a few short years ago. Here are 10 small pieces of magic that made my life easier this year.

Both Amazon and Apple have tablets at the ready for the holiday spending extravaganza. But that means consumers are faced with a choice. So, let's put Apple's iPad Air 2 up against Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX and see which comes out the winner.

This keyboard for the latest tablet from Amazon is much improved over the model we reviewed earlier this year. It's worth a second look by those looking for a reasonable keyboard solution for the Kindle Fire HDX.

Every time a new tablet computer hits the market, experts speculate whether it could be the one to take down Apple's iPad. CNET's Kara Tsuboi explains why Amazon's Kindle Fire could be its stiffest competition yet.

At an Apple press event, CEO Steve Jobs shows off the company's new iBooks app. Users can now browse, read reviews, read a sample excerpt, or just buy books--and the book downloads to a virtual "book shelf." The software has the support of five of the largest publishers, including Simon and Schuster.

At the Supernova Conference in San Francisco, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels broadly outlines the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure. He says Web services offer businesses the ability to lower costs, increase agility, and run a more secure platform within their organizations.

Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer of Netflix, claims the company is well-positioned to stay strong in the subscription market. While companies like Apple and Amazon may be able to offer streaming capabilities, Netflix can offer hybrid packages so users can receive media any way they like it.

ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind demonstrates what happens when Amazon's Kindle is awakened from a crashed state. He also answers questions like: What's the recovery like?, How graceful is the comeback? And will resetting the device wipe out its memory?

In this video, ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind gives his firstimpressions of Amazon's new Kindle book reader. From the design of theuser interface to the built-in EVDO radio, David offers up his freshthoughts on the new device.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos talks toconference attendees about the company's on-demand storage service.Bezos announced that today the S3 service stores more than 5 billionobjects, compared with 800,000 objects stored in July 2006.

Scraping is not a four letter word. In fact, the HTML/HTTP protocol is the easiest way to offer your users a great UI and your applications a useable API, all from the same code. Keep it simple, and you can build an API around any site. In this presentation you'll learn how to build a scraping API with a few lines of code and a touch of style. You'll see how simple it is to build a scrAPI for eBay and Amazon. And we'll do it all using open source code.